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Happy Easter
Easter echoes the older human festivities that celebrate the arrival of spring. The dark and cold days of winter are gone. The bright time of fertility has come.
Today's fertility symbols of Easter, the egg and the hare, relate to the old Germanic fertility goddess Eostre (Ostara).
The Christian resurrection of Jesus is probably a transformation of the story of Ishtar, a Mesopotamian goddess of love who stepped down into the underworld of death but was revived.
When the Christian belief spread from its eastern Mediterranean origin, the incorporation of old local gods and fables helped to convert the old multi-theistic societies to the new believe. The gods of the pre-Christian religions were not completely discarded, but their tales transformed to support the message the Christian preachers were spreading.
Faberge egg with spring flowers and music box – bigger – detail
A personal Easter ritual, inherited from my father, is to read out loud the Easter Walk from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Faust, Part I:
Look from this height whereon we find us
Back to the town we have left behind us,
Where from the dark and narrow door
Forth a motley multitude pour.
They sun themselves gladly and all are gay,
They celebrate Christ's resurrection to-day.
For have not they themselves arisen?
From smoky huts and hovels and stables,
From labor's bonds and traffic's prison,
From the confinement of roofs and gables,
From many a cramping street and alley,
From churches full of the old world's night,
All have come out to the day's broad light.
…
How it hums o'er the fields and clangs from the steeple!
This is the real heaven of the people,
Both great and little are merry and gay,
I am a man, too, I can be, to-day.
Happy Easter!
No apologies if this link has already been posted:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51470.htm
It ought to have been. It is Part One of Patrick Lawrence’s interview with Sharmine Narwami who has been covering the war in Syria since it began.
Here’s an excerpt:
“.. I first investigated the Syrian death toll 10 months into the conflict. In that month, January 2012, the U.N.’s figure for casualties in Syria was around 5,000 dead. The U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued its first report two months later, in March, stating that 2,569 Syrian security forces had been killed in the first year. Right there we know that half of the dead were neither civilians nor with the opposition. Half of the Syrian dead were security forces, which also informed us that the opposition was, in fact, armed, organized, and very, very lethal.
“How about the other half of the death toll — the remaining 2,431 casualties? I found that they were a mixture of pro-government civilians, pro-opposition civilians, and opposition gunmen in civilian clothing. The “rebels” were not wearing military gear, so they were indistinguishable from civilians. Mainstream media just didn’t want to know this obvious stuff. They asked no questions, they investigated nothing.
“A year later, one of the main opposition casualty counters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which the Western media quote all the time, told me it was hard to differentiate rebels from civilians because “everybody hides it.” By then, in year two, the Syrian death toll had increased tenfold and the U.N. released a casualty analysis that included the information that 92.5 percent of the dead were male. That is not a death toll representative of a “civilian population.”
…..
“I also know the opposition was armed from the start [March 2011] because of my own investigation and discovery that 88 Syrian soldiers were ambushed and killed across Syria in the first month of the conflict…. I have their names, ages, ranks, birthplaces — everything. Then in June 2011, over 100 Syrian soldiers were murdered in Jisr Shughour, in Idlib Province, many with their heads cut off, and nobody could dispute this anymore. Yet we continued to hear “the opposition is unarmed and peaceful” in the media for a good long while.
“But you asked about proportionality, and to that I would simply ask: What if there were armed men in Washington who killed a few cops in the last week of December? In January, these unknown shooters began a campaign of ambushing American servicemen coming and going from their bases in Fairfax, Newport News, Arlington, killing 88 in total. Then, in March, over 100 U.S. soldiers are killed in a single day, half with their heads cut off. What is a “proportionate” response for you…? That answer about proportionality will be different for different people, I can assure you…”
Posted by: bevin | Apr 22 2019 23:28 utc | 70
As this is the thread concerning itself with events of Easter (and all posts seem linked, some sadly so) I would like to ‘resurrect’ an earlier comment by Justi, and maybe help him have a better opinion of this site.
*****
“The Christian resurrection of Jesus is probably a transformation of the story of Ishtar, a Mesopotamian goddess of love who stepped down into the underworld of death but was revived.”
This is an internet Zeitgeist-type myth. The celebration of Eastern goes back to the Jewish Passover celebrations and have nothing to do with seasons. The fact that “Ishtar” and “Easter” sound similar doesn’t proof anything, this is a fallacy. “Easter” refers to the direction of the sun rising and since Palestine lays in the direction of the sun rising, it was natural to refer to the resurrection event as the event in the “East”. Many other European languages preserved the traditional Hebraism, namely Pascha (Pas-cha or Pas-kha) or similar variations. It derives from the Hebrew word “Pessach” or “Pessakh” and simply means to pass over, namely from Egypt to Palestine.
*****
I have a slightly different point of view from either of these historical references, and I’ll start from b’s. My take on that first quote was – from an historical aspect, yes, b is correct. The Christian rite which is Easter follows on from pagan practises, historically speaking. And, then, also, the Christian rite which is Pascha follows on from Passover, historically speaking.
But in the understanding of my Orthodox faith, we are not dealing here with history. We are, in that faith, dealing with eternity – now and ever and unto ages of ages is outside of history. It doesn’t follow one thing after another in a timewise fashion. It touches time, assuredly, but it comes from outside of time.
So, it can equally be said (outside of time) that the pagan practices, the muslim practices, even Christian practices – don’t follow on in a chronological ordering of normal lifetimes but are each an explanation of eternal events impacting the finite world. And thus they are measured against one another not as ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ progressions but as expressions of the same truths which are eternal. And one can say, looking from one to another, which is the fuller expression of those truths? It doesn’t matter timewise; it matters in terms of fullest expression of eternal truths.
Does that help, Justi? For, there is yet to come, after this Holy Week concludes, an earlier Christian expression of these truths, in Orthodox Easter next Sunday. It doesn’t really matter which phase of the moon has decided folk to place it there, but it’s another chance to participate in the eternal/timely occasion we call Easter. And, too, in this expression of it, Easter will last for fifty days, right up to and including the feast of Pentecost.
Happy approach to Easter everyone! Listen to some Holy Week music from the Russian Orthodox Church, Vespers and Liturgy by Rachmaninoff, Gretchaninov, Chesnokov and other great Russian composers, and sing it too if you can! The most beautiful music of the church year is reserved for Holy Week and Easter. Try finding “The Noble Joseph” online – I hope you do, or Holy Week Canons:
By the surging of the sea,
Thou hast buried long ago
the vengeful tyrant;
While now the children of
those saved then by thee
Have buried thee beneath
the ground…
I’m no singer, but I sing these hymns, and time disappears.
Posted by: juliania | Apr 24 2019 16:46 utc | 96
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